R.I. House considers bills on public contracts, apprentices

Wednesday

Apr 2, 2014 at 12:01 AM

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — State lawmakers heard competing views Tuesday on how Rhode Island can best promote an up-and-coming supply of skilled construction workers. On one side were labor leaders and union contractors...

Randal Edgar RandyEdgar1

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — State lawmakers heard competing views Tuesday on how Rhode Island can best promote an up-and-coming supply of skilled construction workers.

On one side were labor leaders and union contractors who support a bill that requires companies that bid on state, local or quasi-public agency contracts worth $1 million or more to assign at least 15 percent of the work, or “labor hours,” to apprentices.

On the other side were the business owners and educators who support a bill that says companies bidding on state contracts worth $10 million or more “may employ apprentices.”

There was little common ground between the two camps as they testified before the House Labor Committee, even as each side occasionally made the same claims — that the goal was to create a level playing field among companies bidding on public jobs, that the goal was to encourage training of younger workers.

House Bill 7623, sponsored by Rep. John Carnevale, D-Providence, is similar to a bill that passed two weeks ago in the Senate. Backed by labor, it addresses the needs of the present as well as the future, said George Nee, president of the state AFL-CIO.

“This is an opportunity for you to put into legislation a scenario where young people have an opportunity to engage in meaningful work at terrific salaries and benefits to help build this state, to help build the infrastructure of this state,” Nee told the committee.

House Bill 7697, sponsored by Rep. Jared Nunes, D-Coventry, avoids the mandatory language on apprenticeship programs and the allocation of work to apprentices but encourages the use of such programs while creating a more open process and more competition, supporters said.

“It’s time for us to change how we look at things in Rhode Island,” said Gary Ezovski, of the Small Business Economic Summit. “We’ve got some processes that just have not worked …. And one of those processes is the way that we carve out things for groups. We need all the groups to come together, and that’s what we’re trying to do with 7697.”

But as Ezovski and others said that there should be cooperation, not separation, between career and technical programs that teach construction trades and the apprenticeship programs that are run by contractors, others said there is a difference between learning in school and learning on the job.

And while opponents of Carnevale’s bill said it would prevent many smaller and nonunion companies from bidding on jobs and raise costs for the state and its cities and towns, others said it will not raise costs because registered apprentices can be paid less than the prevailing wage.

The committee voted to hold the bills for further study — a move that came at the start of the meeting, before more than two dozen people took turns testifying. But committee Chairman K. Joseph Shekarchi, D-Warwick, made it clear that he did not consider the bills to be dead. Rather, he encouraged people on each side to talk and try and work out a compromise.

In the meantime, he said committee members would be reading through the mounds of written testimony that people turned in.

The Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Cranston, passed on March 20 by a vote of 26 to 10, with four Democrats, one independent and all five Senate Republicans voting against. The vote to pass was no surprise, as the Senate had also approved the bill in 2013, only to see it stall in the House.

Miller’s bill is similar to Carnevale’s but it requires bidders to commit to assigning at least 10 percent of the work, or “labor hours,” to apprentices, rather than the 15 percent in Carnevale’s bill. Also, Miller’s bill would take effect on Jan. 1, 2015, for state and quasi-government contracts and April 30 for local government contracts, while Carnevale’s would take effect immediately.